Hands-on review: CleanMyMac X utility for macOS

Being a macOS user I often laugh at the disk scans and defragmentations that Windows users do on a regular basis.

But then I stumbled across this tool called CleanMyMac and wanted to give it a try.

First of all the interface is clean and fun to use. It's visual and shows you what tile of maintenance task it's completing at any one time.

There are so many individual types of maintenance tasks that you can do with the tool that they've bundled them all up into a Smart Cleanup routine, which does all the key ones in one go.

I've got a MacBook Air with a fixed hard drive of 120GB and this was nearly full.

After first running the Smart Cleanup it identified over 6GB of unnecessary files that it could clean. On my system, out of the numerous areas it looked at, the two key areas were System Junk and Localisation files. These two represented almost all of my space savings.

I went ahead and the process took about two minutes to complete all the necessary maintenance.

It could've been in my own head but things did feel a bit snappier, in particular loading Adobe Photoshop. I also felt satisfied and it definitely freed up some much-needed hard drive space.

One of the areas where other reviewers have experienced big speed increases has been in the bloated Apple Mail application, which I don't use.

After the initial scan, you do get occasional reminders that you need to run it again, although these tend to be much less satisfying as they only save a few hundred megabytes of hard disk space.

The part of the app that is a killer feature in my opinion and that appeals to my undiagnosed OCD is the uninstall feature.

I've tried many apps and most I don't continue to use after an initial reason for use. The problem with macOS is that we don't have an easy uninstall feature like our Windows comrades.

This is all dealt with; you can either initiate a full uninstall from within the CleanMyMac app or when you drag the app you want to remove to the trash it asks you if you want to clean up all the other related files.

The app does install a menu item that monitors applications and notifies you if an app has a potentially frozen app and asks if you want to close it.

In the latest version of CleanMyMac, this menu has expanded. You can now live monitor malware and threats, storage, battery, CPU - RAM. It was very useful and made me realise Chrome is the biggest resource user on my Mac.

I haven't had any issues with the app; it's fast, satisfying and effective.

I also note that while MacPaw the creator of CleanMyMac is USA based, it has a lot of team members in Ukraine. So buying this useful App could be a way to support the cause.

If you're running low on disk space on your Mac and don't want to drag around an external hard drive, then it's a good purchase.